Vladimir Putin NYT op-ed sparks tension ahead of talks

As Russian and U.S. officials met Thursday on a potential Syria chemical weapons solution, many on the Hill where fuming over an op-ed by Vladimir Putin in The New York Times in which the Russian president took President Barack Obama to task for touting American exceptionalism.

“I almost wanted to vomit,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said on CNN after reading the piece.

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The op-ed was published just hours before Secretary of State John Kerry was set to meet Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss a proposed agreement for Syria to turn over the country’s chemical weapons to international control to be destroyed.

As the duo opened the talks with remarks to the press Thursday afternoon, Lavrov said he was not laying out Russia’s political position because they were articulated in Putin’s piece.

“Our approaches are clear, and they are stated in the statements of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and in his article in The New York Times, and I’m convinced that all of you read this article,” Lavrov said through an English translator. “I decided not to lay out here our diplomatic position. Diplomacy likes silence, and we intend to find compromises.”

“This is not a game, and I said that to my friend Sergey,” Kerry said in his remarks. “It has to be real. … We are serious, Mr. Foreign Minister, we are serious, as you are, about engaging in substantive, meaningful negotiations even as our military maintains its current posture to keep up the pressure on the Assad regime.”

Back in Washington, in comments to the press before meeting with his Cabinet, minus Kerry, Obama said earlier Thursday he was “hopeful” about the talks.

“I am hopeful that the discussions that Secretary Kerry has with Foreign Minister Lavrov as well as some of the other players in this can yield a concrete result and I know that he is going to be working very hard over the next several days over the possibilities there,” Obama said. He ignored reporters’ questions about Putin’s op-ed.

Asked specifically about the op-ed, a State Department representative said Russia now needs “to put forward actions now, not just words.”

In the piece, Putin denied the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against civilians, instead blaming the rebels, and he criticized Obama’s speech to the nation this week.

“I carefully studied [Obama’s] address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation,” Putin wrote.

Putin also lambasted the U.S. as an aggressor with a negative international reputation.

“Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us,’” Putin wrote, referencing Iraq and Afghanistan and urging a “return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.”

“I was insulted,” House Speaker John Boehner said when asked for his “blunt” reaction to the piece in his weekly press briefing Thursday.

Asked to elaborate, Boehner declined.

“No, I think that the president does foreign policy,” Boehner said. “I probably have already said more than I should have, but you got the truth.”

Frequent and outspoken Putin critic Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) minced no words over his take on the piece.

”Putin’s NYT op-ed is an insult to the intelligence of every American,” McCain tweeted Thursday morning.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) echoed the nausea experienced by Menendez.

“It sickened me that we would have to sit there and read that,” Inhofe said on MSNBC’s “Jansing and Co.” on Thursday. “But let’s look at it through Putin’s eyes. He now knows that we had to come to him to get out of a hole. So, I think he’s enjoying a lot more than Menendez and I are enjoying it.”